1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to contact center operation, and, in particular, to a system and method to use statistical measures of waiting time to determine the mode of handling that an arriving call should be accorded.
2. Description of Related Art
An incoming call or contact to a conventional contact center is queued while a routing engine of the contact center tries to find the first available agent or resource matching certain criteria in order to handle the call. The calls can be queued in the system for a very long while waiting for an available agent or resource. However, the call while queued occupies resources such as network bandwidth, CPU, etc., which could be used to handled other calls. This results in degraded service offered to customers and can lead to higher operating costs for call center operator. Thus, queued calls incur a cost to the call center operator, and conventionally this cost is ignored by decision making algorithms. The call may result in a financial loss to the contact center if it waits too long in queue.
Therefore, a need exists to provide an improved process to select a mode of handling a customer call, which takes into account the cost of queueing a call, in order to provide greater expected levels of profit for the contact center operator, and ultimately improved customer satisfaction.